Setting up Home Assistant on Raspbian Jessie Lite with I2C

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3 which can run on the Raspberry Pi to interface and control may of the internet of things (IOT) devices available from different manufacturers.

I was first told about Home Assistant a couple of weeks ago from one of our AB Electronics UK customers who wanted to use our IO Pi Plus port expander in his smart home to control lighting and other devices via the Raspberry Pi.

I downloaded the Hass.io release of the Home Assistant software which is a full disk image and after booting it, I found that it was very locked down and I wasn’t able to install any third-party libraries or run any python code to test the boards. I later found that you can run your own python code as “Custom Components” but it is a much more restricted system than I am used to using on the Raspberry Pi.

After some research, I found that I needed to set a new password for the new homeassistant account using: “sudo passwd homeassistant” which then resulted in this error when trying to install the software needed: “homeassistant is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.”

Below are the steps I used to get the Raspbian version of Home Assistant running.

Update 17th August 2017

With the new release of Rasbian Stretch today, I downloaded the new release and everything works the same as the instructions for Raspbian Jessie below.